We arrived back to Georgetown Yacht Basin and Kerpa ca 02:00 in the morning of the 20^th of October after a final 4-hour trip by rental car from JFK airport. It was a little of a shock to step out of the car as the weather was and are very cold here in Georgetown. We have no heater for the 220v 60 Hz, that the US Marinas offer if you configure the cords in the electrical plug the “right” way. We can run the charger and air conditioner with that set up, but our heater works very poor. We usually have ca 8-degree C or 46 F in the morning when we wake up, but I must admit that we have slept very well.

A jug of chocolate with a generous addition of Rum give some warmth so does the oil lamp. I had caught a cold and complained for my daughter about it, She suggested that I should drink ginger tea. I can strongly recommend it, make a cup of tea, add thin slices from ca 1 cm of fresh ginger, it taste almost as good as the Chocolate with Rum and my cold has become much better.

The 20th of October happens to be my birthday so we celebrated it in a very plain way by going to the local Marina bar and shared a plate of nachos and some chicken wings, no extravagance for us.

The Nacho plate was rather large, so we might treat our self coming Saturday by sharing a plate and a few beers.

Provisioning

On our priority list is to provision while we have the rental car and fill up the boat to make us as independent as possible.

First visit to the liquor shop, we made one more visit!

80+ liters of milk

It is a hard job to find space for everything, but Kerstin is becoming very skillful in packing the boat.

We use the marinas ice box to freeze our meat and chicken, we buy chicken legs of the bone, they cost a little bit more but taste much better. This is about 2/3 of all the meat we put in our freezer, now it is full to the rim. A freezer saves money and make you much more independent, we do praise our freezer a lot.

Our stock of Pasta, we have bought about 15 packages of morning cereal’s, 25 packages of yeast with the corresponding amount of flower. I think we do not need any major provisioning for a few months now.

 

New gadgets

We have ordered a “few” things for Kerpa to be delivered to the Marina, they have a small room to store things that the guests order, they where happy that we now started to empty the room as we took up more than 50% of the total space. Amazon is our major supplier, the strange thing is that they do ship in very large boxes, and when you open it, most of the space is filled with packaging material “protecting” a rather small box, not strange the roads are full of lorries if half of the boxes are empty.

One of the more fun things was our “Hookah” dive system from Gator Gill

It has a 0,75 hp electric motor that runs on 12 v, they claim it can supply air for two divers down to 18 meters. I have my doubts about that. I will be pleased if it can supply air for two divers at 2 meters depth cleaning the bottom from fouling and in worst case free up a fouled propeller, that is the main purpose of the equipment, but of course we can use it for recreational diving also if we find a good spot close to the boat, or put it in our dingy and go out to a nice reef and dive.

I’m testing it and at least it works in the cockpit!

Our boat work on 24 v, so I needed to install a converter from 24 to 12 v. This small converter from Victron is rated up to 70 A 12 v continuous load, should be more than enough as the hookah draws 35 A.

The teak ply that I use as a base for mounting I brought together with a hand saw from Sweden down to Kerpa when we bought her, I did not expect to get much use of any of them, but I was wrong, not very much ply left and the saw have come in handy many times.

I had to install a new bilge pump the old one needed to be replaced, unfortunately I had to replace all the hoses as well from 1,25 inch diameter to 1,5 inch as the socket of the pump was 1,5 inch. Hoses are not very cooperative at low temperature but a good heat gun certainly improve cooperation from a stubborn hose.

Our old compass had become incontinent and I was afraid it would not improve so we had to install a new compass.

Our printer went into holiday mood and become very slow, about 5 minutes to print one page in B&W, so we decided to retire it, the new young and eager one works much better and demand much less office space.

Kerpa on the hard

We had agreed with the yard to have a free lift to pressure wash the bottom, and it was definitely necessary.

Copper Coat does not work very well in fresh water they say, hope it will work better in salt water. The reason we bought the Hookah is to save cost not having to lift so often to clean the bottom, now we can do it frequently and maybe have some fun with is as well.

However it was less fun to discover that the yard had not made a proper job when applying the Copper Coat, I specifically asked for 5 coats, but it looks as they put on about two coats, of course I become very angry and had a big row with the foreman, he called the owner and most probably complained that he had a very abusive customer who needed immediate attention from him. The owner came to Kerpa inspected the inferior job then he politely asked me if I wanted them to put on the additional coats, but that is a no option as we must leave soon to take part in the Salty Dawg rally to Antigua. I said I want the money back so that I can have it done properly when hauling out next time, he “agreed?????” so now he will calculate what it can be worth, so I’m still waiting for being reimbursed.

The weather is as mentioned earlier very cold, we now expect strong wind and rain, so we will probably stay at the marina until Monday, hopefully the wind and weather will be cooperative enough for us to make the +/- 160 nM sail down to Hampton for the Rendezvous with the other participants in the Salty Dawg Rally to Antigua with departure 3/11 weather permitting.

The delay in departure due to weather have had at least one good thing with it, as several things that I have postponed since long, now have been done. Such as changing the transmission fluid in the gear box, have probably never been done. Smoke detector in the engine room, fixed some nonfunctional lights, etc. but rest assure there would be a long list if I decided to list all things that has been postponed.

This might been boring reading, but cruising and living on a boat is not only visiting beautiful places and partying, a lot of time goes to maintenance,  replacement and improvements of the boat. I’m not the only one having bad luck with yards doing an inferior job, we have meet many others who had experienced the same as us.

We invited a couple who also are in the marina on dinner yesterday. They have just bought their boat and making the “Final” preparation to go cruising and live aboard. We told them what we told each other when we just bought Kerpa, that from that date almost all surprises related to the boat will be negative. Very few if any will be positive, well you would not wake up one morning and find a bare of gold or a pile of bank notes in a drawer, but more likely wake up and find water where it should not be, fridge is not cool, batteries are flat, etc, etc, but despite disappointments the reward of cruising to different destinations meeting new friends seeing wonderful places outweighs eventual disappointments 100 folds.